Dandelyon's Worlds

I decided to change my mood icon set. I still like the little bats, but this one makes me smile.

Happy pride month, everybody!

Yesterday left me sad, having missed the aurora (again) and thinking on a kerfluffle in the local filk community (at least, I hope it will prove to be merely a brief fuss), and issues in a different musical group (I got to listen to an elderly man tell me that he knows what racism is because he uses Hitler's definition (!) and people don't get to change meanings of words (!) and I lost my temper with him, not that he cared.) My music communities are my social lifeline, so these things are very troubling to me. I headed to bed only to have sleep escape me for hours, despite pointing my brain elsewhere by doing duolinguo and reading frivolous fiction and petting a purring cat.

After dawn, I almost gave up and went outside to work in the garden, except it was cold out there, and I was already feeling cold. Finally I fell asleep. Happily, in my dreams, I was at a Worldcon with many friendly filkers around me, with lots of singing and friendly interactions. I particularly remember singing with someone with a very lovely deep voice. I woke feeling healed and hopeful. I hope that dream is a good omen for things going forward. (And many thanks to the filkers who came to my dream Worldcon, and sang and chatted and were good company.)

I got some of the plants I bought on Saturday in the ground, but not all of them. Waking after 3 pm leaves a very limited amount of outdoor time after doing things like getting dressed and eating breakfast, especially with clouds blowing in and rain arriving before sunset. But I now have cucumber plants in the garden! I'm still hoping the stores get Cherokee Purple tomatoes in, but I have some other tomato varieties out there, and some squash too. A few Ausilio peppers. And pea seedlings, finally. Soon I'll have to plant beans too, but they are truly a warm weather plant; no point in planting them until it's warm enough for them to germinate instead of rotting in the ground.

We are also moving some of the now-abundant wood violets that have moved inward from the borders of the garden from where they would be crowding the vegetables to other places in the yard, to make other border areas look nice and maybe to encourage the grass to stay out of where we're planting flowers and/or vegetables. It makes me smile to see all the little purple flowers! Of course, they only bloom in spring, but right now there's a lot of them, even more than dandelions.

And I got to chat with my daughter for Mother's Day (twice even, because she was hanging out at my sister's house and the first call got interrupted by dinner). She's doing well, and is past the probation period of her new job and is taking a training that she's excited about now that the new job will pay for it. So, all in all, a better day than yesterday.

Yesterday was frustrating, but it had some high points. I woke up to find that the black cat had once again pooped in the upstairs hallway, and so spent time doing things like mopping there, which was not on my plan for the day at all (and should have been done by my partner days ago, but all she'd done was pick up the solids and spray the floor with the denaturing spray). That eventually led to partner slipping on the stairs and dumping the entire mop bucket on the floor. She's ok (thank goodness), and (also thank goodness) I had a hamper full of dirty towels waiting by the basement stairs to throw on the floor to limit that mess and to keep it from seeping down to the basement and causing huge additional messes to clean, but that led to more mopping before breakfast, and much frustration.

My plan was to go to the gardening store, early, but partner had a medical appointment, so we ended up going to the gardening store late instead, and they didn't have the Cherokee Purple tomato plants I'd hoped to buy. Apparently those will (might) arrive by Monday. A nice manager checked to see if their other locations might have the plants I wanted, which led to arriving home even later than our late start should have led to. They also had only two cucumber plants, but more of those should be arriving later too.

While waiting, we looked at roses and bought an on-sale rose to fill a hole where a rose had died overwinter (I think over a previous winter, rather than the most recent one.) It's bare root, so we can't delay much getting it into the ground, but getting a flower on May Day sale is appropriate.

So we got home shortly before Cathy McMusic's planned Beltaine Concert, and was busy planting the few tomatoes I did buy during the concert, which would have been much more pleasant if the connection didn't constantly break up. I eventually listened to it properly later, improvising playing bass along with her songs.

And then the cat shat on the hallway floor again. Ugh. And looking around at my house, it's hard to remember how much progress I was making before I got the stupid Covid a year ago.

But in better news, in the lonely spot in the grass where we had, long ago, planted a bunch of tulips in a little circle garden that my daughter gave me, which had one lonely tulip show up most years thereafter, we found a little circle of four tulips! I guess the survivor got lonely, and created some new buds. I may yet dig them up and transplant them to a less lonely spot, but not while they're flowering. So that was at least one nice surprise for the day.

And I got to listen to live (over the internet) Beltaine music, and secretly play along with a couple of my favorite musicians in my own music room, and I lit a candle for my Beltaine fire, since I wasn't in the mood for sitting outside in the chill.

The lilacs are starting to bloom, and we still have a few ragged daffodils, and some lovely tulips, and I have some experimental pepper seedlings (experimental because I haven't tried those varieties, so if I get fruit I'll find out if I like them), and some sunflower seedlings, and outside there are lots of violets and dandelions. And I double-checked the 30-day forecast, and there are still no more lows predicted below the 40s (F), so while the beginning of May is historically risky for putting tomato plants outside, I'd been taking the ones I grew indoors out most days to harden them to sun and wind for weeks, and I feel safe getting them properly situated. (Two of the ones I overwintered are even blooming!)

And we did get the replacement seep hose buried, though that delayed planting peas. So there's lots of happy spring gardening news. Here's hoping for no Covid this year, and nothing else serious, and that the long covid keeps getting better. I have things to do and, especially, wonders to create!

I had a great time at GAFilk, but not so great a time driving home, as the winter storm blew in long before we got home. That made the driving both longer and a lot more stressful. We pushed through, and arrived home safe, but exhausted. And the stupid Long Covid waves of exhaustion have intensified. Emotionally, I'm so very over this crap, but obviously physically is another story.

I did manage to pay bills this week, and make stew, but hardly anything more. Minimal music practice. Nothing done toward organizing the house this week, not even getting the pages of lyrics I'd alphabetized before the con into the three ring binders waiting for them. Bleah. And the ongoing winter weather has not helped anything.

Well, on further consideration, today I have managed to do some laundry, and I took the shop vac down into the laundry room to vacuum out the inside of the dryer from the back, which has increased the efficiency of said appliance. And I made stew, so there's leftovers for a couple of days. But I wanted to be doing a lot more practice, and some recording. Maybe tomorrow. Even having napped, I don't have a lot of focus.

It's not none, at least--I'm here, after all.

For some reason, I didn't see the Friday Five questions until today.  They are all about dreams, which is an interesting topic.

1. What was the last dream that you had about?

Lately, a lot of my dreams have been set at SF cons, though usually ones that aren't at all realistic. They might be in an office building, for instance, or a huge mansion, and I spend time with unlikely people and there's usually no filk. In real life, I rarely go to a con that doesn't have organized filking, both because I love the song circles and because a lot of my closest friends at cons are filkers. But there are often speculative fiction elements that, in the dream, are perfectly normal and real. Actual vampires or shifters, for instance, or casual minor time travel, or one or another sort of magic, or any number of other things. I always have things to do, though those things don't always make sense to my waking mind. But they matter in the dream.

2. Does it hold any significant meaning to you?

I have not, in the recent past, woken up with any particular sense of meaning that carries forward to my waking life.  Except, perhaps, the obvious--that I wish I lived in a world without Covid, and was spending more time traveling and spending time with friends.  But I certainly don't need dreams to have that insight.  Now that I wonder about the "cons with no filking" thing, it occurs to me that I get to do a lot of filking via zoom, and very little of the other things I enjoy at cons.  Perhaps the dreams are just trying to fill a need.

3. Do you dream in color or black and white?

Color. Sound and feeling too.  My dreams are very realistic, if you judge "realistic" by having a full sensory experience and not by the presence or absence of speculative fiction elements.  It's very rare for me to have a dream that wouldn't be judged SF or fantasy for the presence of those elements, and has been since I was small.

4. What is the most frightening dream you ever had?

The one that scared me the most ever was when I was in High School and dreamed I'd forgotten to do my math homework.  I woke up in a panic, and it took some time for me to go over the events of the day before in my mind to reassure myself that the experience was not in the same continuous reality as my waking life, and must have been, therefore, only a dream.

(I have dreams that include monsters, even scary monsters, all the time, but those are antagonists in the current dream-adventure, which may be frustrating and challenging, but is not a nightmare.  Scary monsters are a thing to challenge or outwit, or even occasionally befriend, they don't make the whole dream scary)

5. Is there one dream that stays clear in your mind despite the fact it was more than a few years ago?

In college, I had a dream where I was swimming in the middle of the ocean, and instead of worrying about whether there were sharks or whether I could survive until found or swim to somewhere I could get out on dry land or anything else reasonable and logical, I was frantically trying to keep my watch out of the water. There was a soundtrack--"You've got to stop and smell the roses..." Upon awakening, I thought that dream, at least, had a very clear meaning!

In the very distant past, on a night after some one of my relatives took me on a trip on the el to (somewhere) in Chicago for something (Christmas displays?  A sports thing?  Shopping?) I remember spending the entire night looking at still photographs of all the strange people I saw.  The next morning, my mother asked me how I slept and I said not at all.  Of course, she inquired further, and finally, upon me describing my experience of the night before, she told me I had been dreaming.  I was VERY doubtful of that explanation.  Looking at hundreds of photographs did not seem at all dream-like to my young self.  But my mother was relieved to realize I had been sleeping after all.

I was feeling closer to normal yesterday, despite getting up a little bit short on sleep to host Eurofilk when KJM had an unexpected conflict. I managed to trouble-shoot why the basement freezer drawer wouldn't go back in far enough to shut the door (a frozen pizza had fallen behind it), sing a bunch of songs in the filk, and go out to garden and pull weeds from around all of the still-too-small squash plants. Then I had some food, put away groceries, and cut stuff up to throw in the slow cooker.

And then I fell in bed and fell asleep very quickly, and stayed there (except for a call of nature, followed by drinking quite a lot of water because I felt dehydrated and doing some duolinguo) until 4 pm today. Today, all I've done is eat, put away the leftovers, and do a brief amount of gardening (there wasn't a lot of light left by the time we got outside). And now I'm ready to make a salad, eat the salad, and fall in bed again.

Well, that normal feeling was nice while it lasted!

I also got to see a note the doc left in the online access thingy saying that the stress test was normal. Not a surprise, since I read it, but good to know that there wasn't something worrying in the parts of the jargon or numbers that I don't know or don't know the "normal" values for. This is good, since it means I don't need to be careful not to stress the heart, I can exercise and try to build up my endurance. When I'm not sleeping, at least.

Despite the heat, the peas are still producing pods. This makes me happy.

In other garden news, I have just one green tomato, but the plants are growing. The cucumber plants are tiny still; the squash plants have set some male flowers (but they are still small too), I can see some bean plants starting to stretch upward, and we got the two little mulberry trees that were right next to the house moved. So, some progress there. It's so nice that plants can grow and fruit when I'm too busy or too tired to tend them!

I just made a Mastodon account: wyld_dandelyon@ceilidh.online

Now to find people and look around a little. Tomorrow.

So, a couple of weeks ago, the post-covid brain fog led to me asking My Angel to get cabbage (which I already had) instead of apples, which I needed for my version of waldorf salad. So I mixed up a bowl of cabbage, shredded carrot, and canned pineapple (sliced tiny). The pineapple was really disappointing, more sweet than pineapple flavored. Ah, well, that's canned for you.

For my best experiment before today, I added sliced leftover ginger pickle, onion, and soy sauce. I think that version would have been really good with sliced roast beef added, if I'd had any handy, but I didn't. Or peanut pieces, which I also didn't have.

I did turn some of it into waldorf salad, adding chopped walnuts, apple, and mayo, and decided (no surprise) that the carrot didn't work particularly well in it.

Today, I took the last of it and added dried apricot, sliced very small, sliced onion, minced fresh ginger, and soy sauce (gluten free, as always). This version was inspired by the thought that carrot and ginger are a good combination. It was good.

So that's two different alternate (to me) cabbage salads that are worth further experimentation in the future.

Now I should put on outdoor clothes and go pick peas. There's lots of mulberries out there too. And I'll have to water the garden the old fashioned way, since it didn't rain yesterday and neither I nor My Angel have had the energy post-covid to dig up the old, broken one, and lay the new one into the ground.

I looked at the weather forecast, and even if I went out into the rain, cucumber seeds aren't likely to sprout out there any time soon. So, I figured, I have the skills to transplant tiny seedlings when it gets warm, and started some in one of my tiny indoor greenhouses. They're all snug in their moist little nurseries now, between a heating pad and a grow light.

And I stayed warm and dry. Well, dry and warmish, anyway, since I don't want to pay to turn the heat up. But that's a lot better than cold, wet, and miserable.

I think (finally) the breathing is predictably better than it was, but my chest still feels tight. I seem to be a little more clear-headed too. Here's hoping the trend continues. I have things I would rather be doing.

I believe I'm getting better slowly. I definitely felt better two days ago, then yesterday I woke up and decided I didn't even want to go out in the garden without washing my hair, so I took a bath, and I was falling asleep in the bath. I rinsed my hair and laid down and slept for 7 more hours. Today I was not so tired, until I tried doing things and came back in for my rescue inhaler and to just sit for a bit.

This picture is from a couple of days ago. I took the leftover salad from some takeout and added some lilac flowers and dandelion petals. It sure made it pretty! I meant to add some of the basil seedlings, but that thought escaped me until after I'd eaten the salad. Dumb brain fog.

The brain fog is also making Duolinguo frustrating. I'm forgetting to finish sentences and forgetting the spelling of way too many words. It's worse this week than it was when I was sicker, which is doubly frustrating. If I'm feeling better overall, my brain ought to be working better too! But I'm pushing through that, since I know so little of what I have learned is solidly in long term memory that I'll lose a lot of ground if I don't.



Oh, and I paid the yearly renewal for the license plates before it was overdue. I have trouble feeling accomplished when getting so little done, but not paying a late fee is a good thing.